Valor Mortis, the new game from the studio behind the cyberpunk FPS platformer Ghostrunner, has quietly been building buzz all year, and now it’s about to launch into the busiest part of the fall season. The developers announced on Thursday that the upcoming Soulslike will be just $40. They’re hoping the aggressive discount compared to most premium games will give it a better shot at earning people’s time and attention.
“We have had many discussions over the past year about the price of Valor Mortis,” reads today’s announcement from the developers. “We believe the game has the quality, fidelity, and playtime in its 20-hour story to go toe-to-toe with many ‘full price’ titles. Still, this fall is stacked and there’s high demand for your time and money.”
We’ve seen a lot more pricing variability lately in gaming. Releases like last year’s Mafia: The Old Country and last month’s Star Wars Zero Company, which might have previously shipped at $60 or $70, arrived at just $50 on Steam instead. We’ve seen something similar with indie games.
Gameplay clips but I cut away before anyone gets hurt to avoid the censor algorithm pic.twitter.com/zkiN64nEfD
— Valor Mortis (@ValorMortis) September 14, 2026
Mina the Hollower arrived at just $20, even when games with similar scopes and production budgets had been inching up toward $30. As loads of cheap but still great games flood Steam, including friendslop breakouts like Peak, developers are in a race to do anything that may give them a better shot at early success.
“This is something we’ve really agonized over,” Blake Rochkind, the head of Valor Mortis publisher Lyrical Games, told The Game Business. “My biggest concern was that it would send the wrong message about the game. But this decision is made out of confidence.”
He noted that it’s a packed season. Even if you release with a few weeks’ distance from juggernauts like Grand Theft Auto 6 and the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, a stacked release calendar means that prospective players might already have their time and money spoken for elsewhere. Out October 13, Valor Mortis puts you in the shoes of a former Napoleonic soldier with supernatural powers fighting terrors on the battlefield. It’s a neat mash-up, but even novel ideas and quality execution aren’t enough to ensure a game succeeds anymore.
“We are pretty confident in Valor Mortis. But ultimately, the worst thing we could do is not push our chips in and say, ‘We want this to be a game that you can pick up alongside these other great games,’” Rochkind continued. “A developer I spoke to recently had a lot of success with a game priced at $30, which would probably be $40 today. One thing they said that really stuck with me is: ‘We never regretted being an ‘and’ game. We never regretted pricing our game as something that you can pick up alongside other games.’ Going with this price point will help us be an ‘and’ game.”
